I was kinda worried about being the new kid, but apparently new kids are cool here. This guy named Scott Marsh who seems pretty popular and has a good jump shot was really nice to me, so the other guys were nice to me, too. I think maybe because me and Scott were wearing the same Air Jordans and I’m taller than most of the kids in fifth grade and they need a center. I’m tall because I’m actually a year older, but they don’t need to know about what happened last year. This is a do-over. We’re in a new town, and I told everyone my name is Will because I’m too old for Billy, and so far everybody likes Will, so that’s good.
The guys asked me to eat at their lunch table the first day, and it sort of felt like an interview, but I guess it went okay because now it’s a regular thing. I’m doing better in school than usual, in part because I already did half of fifth grade once, and also because everything is fine at home. Our new house is smaller, but there are woods in back, and I saw a deer out there last week, watching me. I guess I miss my dad, but my mom—it’s like she’s relaxed for the first time in forever. She’s there when I get home in the afternoon, smiling. Sometimes there are even cookies. It’s weird, but it’s nice. Better.
Three weeks into school, and I guess I’ve passed another test because Scott invites me over to spend the night, along with Johnathan and Brad, who are like his best friends. Scott’s house is nicer than anybody’s house I’ve ever been in, with a pool and a pool table and a big TV in the den, the kind that has a fancy wooden case and is half as tall as me. They have cable and get like fifty channels that I didn’t even know existed, and he has a bunk bed and everything. When my mom dropped me off, she told me to remember my manners and be careful.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” she asked as her Datsun chugged away in front of this fancy brick house. We both knew she meant more than that, though. She stubbed out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray and tried to grab my face, but I pulled away because what if the guys were watching from behind Scott’s curtains.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I told her, because I will be.
She tried to smile encouragingly and failed. “Have fun, baby,” she managed, and then I was walking up the sidewalk, my new red sleeping bag rolled tightly under my arm along with a pillow in a plain white case. I left my Star Wars pillowcase back home because Brad said Star Wars is for nerds, and I disagree but I want the guys to like me.
We start off swimming because it’s still warm enough for that in September in Georgia, and I didn’t bring a suit because how could I know? Scott lends me an old one and I keep my shirt on and we take turns doing cannonballs off the diving board and I do a big jackknife and splash Scott’s older sister Lindsay and she gets mad and goes inside and everybody laughs and Brad high fives me. Scott’s mom comes out with a tray full of lemonade and cookies and a big bag of chips, and she’s the prettiest mom I’ve ever seen. She looks like Goldie Hawn, and she wears makeup at home, and she’s so nice. They have a little brown wiener dog that follows her around, his whole butt wagging with his tail, and his name is Spanky and I wish I still had a dog.
We’re on loungers discussing which movie is better, Top Gun or Rambo, when Scott’s dad appears, and I tense up but everybody else seems fine. His dad kind of looks like Sean Connery, and he’s in a gray suit, but he’s smiling, and it seems like a real smile.
“Working hard or hardly working?” he says.
“Hey, Mr. Marsh,” the other boys say.
“Who’s the new kid?” Mr. Marsh asks.
“This is Will. He just moved here from—” Scott looks at me. “Where’d you used to live?”
“Idaho,” I lie, because that was on the back of the potato chip bag.
“What city?”
“Boise, sir.”
He nods like this is interesting, and I hope he doesn’t ask me any more questions because I’ve never been to Idaho and I only know the capitol from a quiz last year and I didn’t think this part through.
“Never been, but I hear there are lots of potatoes,” he says, and it’s meant to be a joke, so the guys kind of laugh, like they’re trying to be polite, and so do I. “Well, welcome to Georgia. I’m sure I’ll see you around.” He ruffles Scott’s drying hair, and Scott looks super embarrassed, but I guess everyone is used to it because no one makes fun of him, after.
Mr. Marsh seems really nice, for a dad. He came out here to say hello to us, he was polite, he tried to make jokes. Maybe he’s so nice because he has a huge house and a pretty wife who makes lemonade. Or maybe some dads are just friendly and kind. I wouldn’t know.
Scott’s mom orders pizza for dinner, and I’m kinda worried we’ll all have to eat together like a family, but we don’t. They have a big basement, and we take a large pepperoni down with us, along with a two-liter of Coke, and it feels like a birthday party but I guess it’s just a regular weekend at Scott’s house. There’s nothing good on TV but Scott has a VCR and we can choose between The Terminator or Splash, and it’s guys, so we watch The Terminator. We set up our sleeping bags and Scott gets the nice couch with Spanky the dog and soon we switch tapes and fall asleep before I can find out if the mermaid dies or not.
I drank way too much Coke, so when I wake up in the middle of the night I have to pee so bad I could die. I don’t know if there’s a bathroom in the basement, but I know there’s one upstairs by the front hall. I tiptoe upstairs by the light of the basement TV, which is still on after the movie is over, stuck on that crumbly gray channel.
As I cross the upstairs hall, I hear a noise I don’t want to hear, so I try to ignore it and take care of my business, because peeing yourself at Scott Marsh’s house would not be cool. I wash my hands and tell myself I’m going straight back downstairs, but …
I have to see, don’t I?
I have to make sure.
Carefully, slowly, I inch toward the den.
The big wooden TV is on, the room bright with stripes of rainbow colors, yellow and white and pink and blue and green reflecting off the white walls. The color test pattern, it’s called—what they play when there’s nothing else on. The TV is emitting a high-pitched whining that makes me grit my teeth. Sitting in a big recliner in front of the screen, Mr. Marsh leans forward, elbows on the knees of his navy plaid pajama pants. He doesn’t look so nice now.
“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” he murmurs flatly, nervously, intently at the TV. “A woman’s place is in the home. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. She was asking for it. Don’t be a pussy. Boys don’t cry. I’ll give you something to cry about. Nothing in life is free. Look to the cross. Spread the gospel.”
My whole body is tense, like I’m being electrocuted, and I squeeze my eyes shut but can’t stop the flashes that come back to me.
I’ve seen this all before.
This is just the beginning.
But it’s not my house, and it’s not my dad, and I don’t ever have to come back here again. I like Scott and all, but not enough to deal with what I know is going to happen.
Tonight will be okay. It’s just starting, and it starts slow. I’ll go home tomorrow morning and the next time Scott invites me over to spend the night, I’ll be busy. And when I see him at school, I’ll pretend not to notice the changes. I’m no Luke Skywalker, no John Connor. I’m not a hero. I’m just a kid. And there’s no point in fighting something you can’t stop. I’ll just look away, and then Scott will deal with it, or he won’t.
Or maybe I’m wrong, and it’s nothing. I head back downstairs and wriggle into my sleeping bag, but there’s no way I can just go to sleep, knowing Mr. Marsh is up there whispering to the TV like they’re old friends. I push Splash back into the VCR and try to focus on the movie, even though it’s kind of stupid. Eventually I fall back asleep, and when we wake up in the morning and go upstairs, there’s Mrs. Marsh with big plates of pancakes and bacon and a jug of Sunny D, and everybody is in a great mood. I don’t tell anyone what I saw. How would I even describe it? No one would believe me.
When my mom comes to pick me up, Mr. Marsh is outside, trimming the hedges with a rusty pair of hedge clippers.
“See you real soon, Billy,” he says.
Only Scott told him my name was Will.
At my house, we only have one TV. It’s newer and smaller, and we don’t have a VCR, although I hope we can get one for Christmas. We had one at the old house, but it’s gone, just like everything else. When I get home, Mom settles on the couch and turns it on to some old movie, and I don’t hear a high-pitched whine or anything.
“You could have the boys over here,” she offers. “Maybe camp out in the backyard?”
Our new house is kind of shabby, next to Scott’s house, and I don’t know where Johnathan and Brad live, so I don’t know if Scott’s house is normal or not.
“Maybe,” I say, but the backyard can be a little creepy. I’ve been seeing more and more deer out there, and I hear them rustling when I take the garbage out to the can.
That night before I go to bed, I unplug the TV, and I sleep fine, and I wonder if maybe I just dreamed the thing with Scott’s dad, if it was just another stupid nightmare. But on Monday morning at school, Scott is quiet, and he’s wearing a long-sleeved shirt even though it’s like a million degrees.
“You okay, man?” I say.
“Yeah, fine. Why?”
The questions I want to ask him wouldn’t make sense unless it’s happening again, and even then, he would probably deny it. It’s not the sort of thing guys talk about, even when they’re really good friends, which we’re not.
It gets worse in the days after that. Scott looks tired, his eyes puffy like he’s been crying. He keeps wearing long-sleeved shirts, and one day he has a bruise on his cheek. He says he got it playing baseball, but I know he didn’t. It’s not going to get better if someone doesn’t do something, but I can’t tell him that. People don’t want to believe things that don’t make sense, even when they’re happening. I sure didn’t, not until I had no choice. I hope he figures it out. I wish I could help him, I do.
The next weekend, Brad invites us over to his house, and I’m relieved to get the invitation again, like I’m really becoming part of their circle. I bring the same sleeping bag and pillow, plus a bathing suit, just in case. Brad’s house is halfway between my house and Scott’s house, a very medium house. All the furniture matches, with big yellow flowers and shiny wood, and Brad has a fat orange cat called Garfield, although Brad says he doesn’t eat lasagna. They don’t have a swimming pool, but Brad lives close enough to the movie theater that we can easily walk there, if we’re careful when we cross the big street. We pay for The Princess Bride but sneak into Fatal Attraction, which I don’t feel great about, but Brad says they do it all the time and no one cares. Scott is quieter than usual, like he can’t concentrate and is constantly about to fall asleep. I’m glad he’s staying at Brad’s tonight—he probably is, too.
The movie kind of freaks me out, but I don’t jump or anything. It’s good, though. Afterwards, as we’re walking back to Brad’s house, Scott clears his throat and says, “That was so crazy, how that lady seemed normal and then turned out to be a psycho, right? I mean, what she did to that rabbit.”
“But how would you know?” Brad says. He’s the loudest and most opinionated. “She seemed pretty normal, up until they did the deed.”
“She was hot,” Johnathan agrees—he’s kind of a horn dog. “I mean, that dress.”
“Well, he shouldn’t have been messing around,” Scott says. “Adultery is a sin.”
Brad looks at Scott like he grew a second head. “Adultery? You can just say cheating, egghead.”
Scott shakes his head. He looks confused. “Cheating is stupid,” he corrects. “Anyway, it’s just weird how someone can seem totally normal and then change all of a sudden. Right?”
I’ve been trying to figure out how to say something, but I guess I kind of have to tiptoe around it.
“Yeah. Seems like he should’ve put a stop to things the moment she started to go psycho. If he’d gone full Rambo, it would never have gotten that bad.”
Brad shoves my shoulder, making me stumble. “Full Rambo? You can’t just beat up a lady because she likes you too much.”
“She was dangerous,” I argue. “She threatened him. And his wife and kid. After the bunny, he should’ve done more than change his phone number.”
“Okay, Rambo,” Brad jokes. “Remind me not to make you mad.”
“Yeah, if Will puts on a bandana, run,” Johnathan says, and we all laugh.
Well, except Scott. He looks like he’s thinking hard about something, which is good.
Maybe he heard what I said.
Maybe he understood what I actually meant.
I need to know.
“How’s Spanky?” I ask him. “I wish I had a dog like that.”
“Uh, he ran away.” Scott clears his throat. “I really miss him.”
“That stinks.”
But what I mean is I know.
It’s getting worse. And now it’ll get worse faster.
“Did your dad help you look for him?”
Scott’s head whips around to stare at me, his eyes wide. “What does my dad have to do with anything?”
I shrug. I think my shirt is getting too small. It feels like it’s choking me. “I don’t know. Just, when a pet goes missing, usually your parents put up signs or ask the neighbors, you know?” But the look I give him—I try to say it with my face, that sometimes that’s not what your parents do at all. They should, but they don’t, because they know what happened to the dog, and so do you, because you were there.
“We can help you look,” Brad says, breaking our stare-down. “Johnathan’s a good artist. We can put up signs. Tape ‘em to stop signs and stuff.”
Johnathan nods. “I’d need a photo.”
“Thanks,” Scott says. “But it’s been a couple of days. He’s probably long gone.”
Brad blows a raspberry. “On those stumpy little legs? I bet some old lady found him and named him Mr. Snuggles or something.”
We all laugh, but Scott looks really sad.
Back at Brad’s house, we let ourselves in with a key Brad gets from under the mat. Mrs. Cohen is already asleep but she left a plate of sandwiches in the fridge for us, peanut butter and jelly. We wolf them down at the table before heading into Brad’s den, where we lay out our sleeping bags around his TV. He somehow convinced his mom to rent Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I’ve really been wanting to see it, but I can’t stop glancing at Scott. He looks like he’s being chased, and like being at Brad’s is barely giving him any sense of relief.
I mean, that makes sense. He still has to go back home tomorrow, and he knows what he’s going to find there.
I stay up as long as I can, and when the tape finishes, I rewind it and start it over again. When I turn back around, I see the TV light reflected in Scott’s open, glassy eyes.
“You okay?” I ask again.
“Why do you keep asking that?”
“Because you don’t look okay. You look like …” I take a deep breath. “Like you’re scared of something.”
“Shut up!” he whispers angrily. “You don’t know anything. I’m not scared. I’m not a pussy.”
“Never said you were, I just know that sometimes … weird things start happening, and this one time, my dad—”
“My dad is fine. Everything is fine. Don’t bring it up again.”
He turns over, his back to me, and puts his pillow over his head.
I don’t know what else I can do.
I tried.
I want to keep watching this awesome movie, but I need to unplug the TV. Just in case. I make sure everyone else is asleep this time and tiptoe around to yank out the cord. The room goes mostly dark, a streetlight outside filtering in through the flimsy curtain. It takes me forever to fall asleep, and I stay asleep until almost dawn.
When I open my eyes, the TV is plugged in again, the color test pattern blindingly bright in the wood-paneled room. A balding man I haven’t seen before is leaning against the kitchen door jamb in a suit and tie, holding a steaming mug of coffee as he stares at the screen.
“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” he says dreamily, almost like he’s delighted. “A woman’s place is in the home. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. She was asking for it. Don’t be a pussy. Boys don’t cry. I’ll give you something to cry about. Nothing in life is free. Look to the cross. Spread the gospel.”
But it’s not just him. Scott is lying on his side in his sleeping bag, eyes locked on the screen, whispering along. I pretend to be asleep. I pretend I don’t see anything.
The next morning, Johnathan asks if we want to come over to his house to shoot hoops and then spend the night there for a double-header, but I’m starting to get this really bad feeling that maybe it’s me, that I’m the problem, and that I shouldn’t go to anyone else’s house. I mean, it’s happened three times, all around me, right? The South Carolina house, Scott’s house, and now Brad’s house. I’m the only thing they have in common. If I had to form a hypothesis like we do for the science fair, it would go like this: Where William Nash goes, TVs start acting weird and dads start to go crazy. I don’t need to infect Johnathan’s house, too.
But it turns out—Johnathan doesn’t have a dad. Just a mom, and he’s an only child, and she lets him do whatever he wants. So that’s probably pretty safe, right? Moms are nice. Moms don’t yell at you and hit you and throw you around and stomp on your dog. Moms wipe jelly off your cheek and bring cupcakes to school on your birthday—Johnathan’s mom did last week, the cake mix baked into ice cream cones so it was like we had two treats in one.
So I call my mom to check that it’s okay, and then me and the guys pack up our stuff and walk over to Johnathan’s house, which is only like half a mile away with the shortcut through the woods. It almost feels like we’re going camping, with backpacks on our backs and sleeping bags and pillows under our arms.
Johnathan’s house is pretty similar to Brad’s, so I guess I have the worst house, but at least I’m not the only one without a dad. And I have an Atari, which no one else does, so maybe that will make it cooler if I ever invite them over.
There are still some extra cupcakes, so we start by eating those, and his mom got New Coke, so I’m glad I came over. There’s a nice basketball hoop in the cul-de-sac, and a couple of neighbor kids come out to play a game, and Scott immediately calls shirts for our team and plays the whole game in a long sleeve, and of course I always keep my shirt on. One of the kids—he’s a year younger than us and he’s named Stevie—invites us over to take turns on his trampoline. I guess cupcakes, basketball, and jumping around don’t mix, because my stomach goes sour, and I ask if I can use the bathroom.
“Just go in the basement,” he says, pointing at a sliding glass door. “But shut the door behind you.”
I barely make it inside the seafoam green bathroom before my guts are exploding, and then I turn on the fan and wash my hands really good and head back out.
“Hey, are you new?” A man’s voice stops me, and I startle and turn around. He grimaces. “Oops, looks like I scared you. Sorry. I’m Stevie’s dad.”
And he looks like a nice dad, in a Spuds Mackenzie shirt on the couch, reading a Clive Cussler book and smiling.
“I’m Will. I’m friends with Johnathan next door.”
“Well, welcome, Will. Ha! Alliteration! I’m an English teacher.” He chuckles at his own joke. “Have fun bouncing, Will!”
I slip back outside, the back of my neck burning. I didn’t see a TV down there, but is it spreading through houses, through dads, or through the actual television? Stevie is nice, and so is his dad, and I had such a bad stomach ache I didn’t even think about … whatever this is.
On the trampoline, Brad and Johnathan are trying to double bounce each other, and Stevie is yelling about rules, and Scott is kind of staring off into space. I stand next to him and quietly whisper, “You should break your TV.”
He looks at me kind of like when a dog isn’t sure whether it should lick you or bite you. “What?”
“Your TV. All your TVs. Just … break them.”
For a moment, he just stares at me and breathes funny.
“That’s crazy. I don’t know why you would even—” He shakes his head, and his eyes go flat. “Do you even know how much that TV costs? Waste not, want not.”
And that’s when I realize—it’s gotten to him, too.
It’s gotten into him.
I have to do something.
I have to.
That night, after the other guys have fallen asleep watching Howard the Duck, I start the tape over and get dressed. I squeeze out the door and retrace our path back to Brad’s house. I know his mom is asleep, and I’m hoping that his dad is, too. If nothing else, I can say I forgot something—my medicine or whatever. Or I’ll say that I sleepwalk. I use the key under the mat to open the door and slip into the den. The TV is off, thank God, and the house is silent. Even Garfield the cat isn’t around, but maybe that’s a bad thing.
I’m not sure what to do—I’ve never tried this before. By the time I took care of it at the house in South Carolina, it was way too late, but maybe it’s not too late for Brad’s dad. The kitchen is lit with a bulb over the oven, and I look around until I see this hammer thing in a jar with other utensils, I think they use it for hitting meat or something? It’s nice and heavy, with little spikey things, so I take it and head for the TV. I’m hoping this will be quiet, but I left the door ajar and I’m ready to run. His parents’ bedroom is upstairs, so I’m pretty sure I can get outside and hide if anyone wakes up.
I unplug the TV first, just to be sure. The plug pops out reluctantly, like it doesn’t really want to. It takes me a few minutes to get up the guts to hit the TV screen with the meat hammer, and the first time, I don’t hit it hard enough. Then I think about South Carolina, about all the blood, and I swing hard.
There’s one sharp crash, and the glass screen shatters. As I run out the kitchen door, meat hammer still in hand, I wish I’d thought to cut the cord first, just in case. I wish I could set it on fire, too. I wish I could set every television on fire, could save every kid whose dad is starting to act meaner than usual and say stuff that sounds like it’s from the Bible and is all about women in the kitchen and boys not being pussies, but that’s a lot of TVs and I’m just one kid and who knows if that would even work.
I pause behind some bushes to see if anyone emerges from Brad’s house, but I guess his parents are heavy sleepers. No lights come on, and I realize I left the door ajar. I hurry back to lock and close it and then return to Johnathan’s house. The night is cloudy and dark, and I don’t see a single car, just a few deer watching once I’m in the woods, their eyes glowing green. One has massive antlers, big and heavy as a chandelier, and I want to run away, but what if he followed? What then?
When I get back to Johnathan’s cul-de-sac, I stare at Stevie’s house sitting silent and dark. His dad seemed really nice, and so did Stevie. I really, really don’t want bad things to happen to either of them. I tell myself I’ll just check to see if the sliding glass door is still unlocked, and it is, so I slip inside with the meat hammer and navigate around the basement, hunting for the gleam of a glass screen. There isn’t one, but I can hear one somewhere, feel that acidic whine in the back of my skull. I creep up the stairs and open the door, and there it is, another big wooden TV, and the nice English teacher is sitting in a recliner, staring at it.
“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” he says, teeth gritted like it hurts him, like he’s fighting it. “A woman’s place is in the home. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. Boys will be boys. She was asking for it. Don’t be a pussy. Boys don’t cry. I’ll give you something to cry about. Nothing in life is free. Look to the cross. Spread the gospel. Spread the word.”
He doesn’t see me. As long as that TV is on, as long as the color test pattern is throwing splashes of blue and purple and yellow over his glasses, I could do anything I wanted to, and he would never know. No one would.
I look down at the hammer in my hand, at the little pyramid-shaped spikes.
If I break the TV, he’ll wake up and ask why I’m in his house.
If I unplug it, same thing.
But if I—
No. This guy hasn’t done anything wrong.
It’s not that bad—yet.
There has to be some other way.
I head back down into the basement and look for the circuit breaker box. My dad had to fiddle with the one at the South Carolina house a lot—it was so old that it was built before electricity existed, so the wiring was all finicky. I know a little bit about how to use it, so when I find it and open it up, it’s pretty easy to identify the right switch.
I could flip it. I could flip them all. Or—
No. If I hit it with the hammer, I might get electrocuted, and then who would know? Who would know anything about what was going on or how to stop it?
I know enough to turn off the TV but not enough to make sure it stays off.
With both hands, I hit as many switches as I can, starting with the one that powers the den, and then I run outside and hide. After a few minutes, a flashlight bobs around, and the TV’s going to be on again soon, and I want to do more, but this is all I can do right now. I can’t—
No. There’s something I can do.
I head to Johnathan’s house next door. His mom, like mine, is a smoker. There are lighters everywhere, so I grab one and hurry back to Stevie’s place. I know a lot about using a lighter because I light cigarettes for my mom sometimes, so I start a little fire behind Stevie’s house where nobody could see and get some twigs going. There’s no more flashlight bobbing around at Stevie’s, so I slip into his basement and carry a burning branch all around, lighting up curtains and the couch and the English teacher’s bookshelf, which goes up with a whoosh and makes me feel kind of bad. Firelight is better than the color bars of a TV, and once I’m sure it’s caught, I run upstairs, throw the branch at the nearest curtains, and run back downstairs and outside and over to Johnathan’s house, where I settle back into my sleeping bag, my heart racing and my fingertips singed.
I wish I could do the same for Brad and Scott.
Maybe I still will.
Maybe this is the way to end it.
And then I’ll never spend the night at anyone’s house ever again, even if it means I’ll lose the first friends I’ve ever been allowed to have and everyone will think I’m some kind of weirdo.
Soon I hear sirens, and we all jump up and run to the front porch, and I act just as sleepy and surprised as everyone else while Stevie and his mom and dad stand in their driveway wrapped up in blankets, watching their home go up in flames as firefighters blast it with water.
A few days later, Brad is wearing a long-sleeved shirt and has a bruise on his neck that he says is from wrestling with his cousin, and I know that even if I saved Stevie’s dad, it’s now or never for Mr. Cohen. I still have the meat hammer, and my mom has plenty of lighters, and so I drink a cup of her Sanka to stay awake and take off some time after midnight. Scott lives closer, and Scott is further along, whatever that means, so that’s where I start. It takes half an hour to hike over there, and I think about what would happen if a cop found me, walking around at one in the morning with a backpack full of hammer and fire, and I accept that I’d rather risk getting in trouble than watch a nice kid like Scott become … well, whatever my dad was, at the end.
I can see from the street that his big TV is on in the den, the color bars throwing their bright streaks against the cracked curtains. I don’t know if Scott has a secret key or a door they leave unlocked, but I don’t have to. On the side of the house nearest the TV, I find a dark spot hidden by bushes—and a small, freshly dug grave with a popsicle stick cross stuck in the dirt. Poor Spanky. I should never have come here to spend the night, but how could I have possibly known?
Some days, what happened in South Carolina just seems like a bad dream, the kind that makes no sense but sticks with you forever. My dad wasn’t a nice dad before that, but I loved him. He would throw the football with me sometimes and we went fishing every now and then, but he had to work a lot and it made him grumpy. When he got the new job in South Carolina, we were going to have more money, so the old mill house was just a rental until he had a few more paychecks and we had picked out a nicer neighborhood to live in for good. But as soon as I walked in, something felt … off. When we plugged our TV into the crusty old outlet, it sparked, and my dad shook his head and said, “Damned old place. Somebody must’ve wired it wrong.” It worked, though, and it didn’t spark again. There was a cross stuck on the wall right over the TV, and no matter what Mom did, it wouldn’t come off.
“It’s a rental,” Dad told her that first day. “You can’t go pulling things off the wall. It doesn’t belong to us. They’ll keep our deposit.”
But the second day, he said, “Jesus died on that cross, and you’ll respect it,” and since my dad had never mentioned Jesus once in my whole life if he wasn’t cussing, I thought it was pretty weird.
On the second night, that’s when I saw the color bars for the first time, and my dad talking back to them.
On the third night, he slapped me—for being late for supper.
On the fourth night, he hit my mom, I think for the first time—because she was excited about a job interview, and after, she cried. “A woman’s place is in the home,” he told her.
And then things got bad. Really bad.
I wish I’d broken that TV the first time I saw my dad talking to it.
But I didn’t, so I’m going to do the next best thing and stop Scott’s nightmare the way I wish someone had stopped mine.
I get the little fire going, but it won’t catch on anything. Scott’s house is mostly brick—I didn’t think about that part. Around back, I open the gate in the tall wood fence and walk up to the house, but the sliding glass door is firmly locked. There are no lights on except the goddamn TV and its color bars, so I use my meat hammer to break a kitchen window and wave my flaming stick in the hole until the curtains catch fire, then toss the whole stick in.
Oh, shit!
My sweatshirt sleeve is on fire, but I forget everything about Stop, Drop, and Roll and run to the pool, jabbing my arm into the water. Somewhere in the house, a fire alarm goes off, and I bolt for the open gate in the fence. My arm stings and is sopping wet, and I know I can’t run through a fancy neighborhood looking like this, so I take a chance and run into the woods. A soft crunch startles me, but it’s just another green-eyed deer. I’m used to them now. There’s another, and another, but they don’t do anything—they just watch. I keep inside the tree line until I’m out of Scott’s neighborhood and onto the main road that leads to Brad’s. It’s another thirty minutes to walk there, and then I’m making another fire against the side of the house. At least Brad’s family leaves their windows open so I won’t have to break anything.
“Hello, Billy,” a voice says, and I spin around to find Brad’s dad standing there in sweatpants and an old Braves shirt.
I don’t know what to do, but his face doesn’t look like it should. His eyes are wide and glassy, his mouth turned down like a much older, meaner man.
He has to know.
It has to know.
I flick the lighter again, trying to get my stick to catch, but I’m having trouble because my hands are shaking. He slaps the lighter, and it goes flying into the dark grass, and I wonder if he broke my thumb.
“You have to spread the word,” he says, and even his voice is different, old and creaky and mean, almost smug. “The Lord’s word. Spare the rod and spoil the child. A woman’s place is in the home. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. She was asking for it. Don’t be a pussy. Boys don’t cry. I’ll give you something to cry about. Nothing in this life is free. Look to the cross. Look to the gospel. Spread the word.”
I swallow hard. “That’s not all in the Bible,” I say, hoping to buy time.
“What do you know, you little heathen? If you went to church, you’d know. You’d show some respect. You don’t set foot in man’s house without respecting his ways.”
“I thought Brad was Jewish.”
“He’ll learn better. He’s learning the gospel right now.”
And it’s true—I can see the dim shine of the color test from a tiny crack in the blinds. The TV is on, and Brad is in there, and I don’t know if I can save him. Not now. Not now that I’ve been caught again.
It was ruled an accident, what happened in South Carolina. They never saw the blood on the wall. If anybody had asked, we would’ve told the truth—that my dad had been acting strange, mean, abusive. We had the bruises and burn marks to prove it, and Mom took Lancelot to the vet before he died, so the vet knew he’d been stomped to death. Even Dad’s job said he’d been going downhill, and they were on the verge of firing him. His entire personality had changed. He was constantly talking about God and the gospel, and he’d never been religious or anything before. Apparently the other guys at work had started calling him Preacher because that was what he sounded like, but not a nice preacher, not the kind of preacher who helps people.
The kind who wants to punish.
Children who don’t behave, wives who don’t obey, other men who sin.
And when the old house caught fire and I’d dragged my mom out, everybody looked at the evidence and said it must’ve been bad wiring, and my dad must’ve died from the smoke. Mom had his life insurance and the money they were saving for the new house, so we moved here, to her hometown, and I thought that once we were away from that awful cross stuck on the wall, everything would go back to normal.
“Come inside, Billy,” Mr. Cohen says. “Come listen to the gospel. Join us. You want to be a good boy, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, because what else is there?
He puts a hand on my shoulder, digs his fingers around the bone, and steers me inside. I feel the TV’s whine like a dentist’s drill, hear my good friend Brad mumbling about things no twelve-year-old boy thinks about, stupid crap about wives submitting and girls hiding their shameful bodies. He’s sitting right in front of the TV, close enough that his hair is standing up with the static.
“Come learn the gospel, Billy,” he says in a super weird voice, and I sit beside him, putting my backpack on the ground with the zipper sort of open.
“Now, Billy, God hates a liar,” Mr. Cohen says. He pulls the meat hammer out of my backpack and wraps his fingers tight around the handle with a little squeeze, like it feels good. “You got to learn.”
I have no fire, I have no hammer, but that doesn’t mean I have nothing. I’m desperate and I’m done and I have the cigarette burns up and down my stomach and back to show it. I put my hands on the ground behind me and kick that TV screen with all my might, busting out the glass and making the guts within spit sparks.
“It’s too late, son,” my father’s voice says from Mr. Cohen’s mouth. “You can break the heathen television, but you can’t break the antenna.”
He—they—it—is wrong, though.
I reach into that TV and curl my fingers into the wires, but they aren’t wires, they’re stringy red guts, tendons, and muscle. My father’s blood slicks my hands, and I reach in deeper, trying to find whatever beating heart is making that sick whining sound. I’m half-inside the TV, pushing aside tangled curtains of intestines and dragging my knees through maggot-clotted meat and a spray of hammer-broken teeth. The guts mix with ashes and I clamber over blackened bones, long, slender, charred, the fingers still in a fist to teach me another lesson, and then I push through some sick, pink membrane and fall onto the familiar floor of a house I’d hoped to never see again because I made sure I wouldn’t.
It’s as if we never left, as if it had never burned. Our TV sits under the cross, and I fall free from the cage of wires and tubes and ribs and onto the uneven wood boards. My father’s blood spatters the wall, but his body is gone, the sick pulp of his head missing from the flowered rug. There’s a noise coming from the cross, that high, droning whine, and I dig my fingers around it and pull and pull and pull until my fingers bleed and the white wall wears fresh stains, but it won’t come off
It won’t come off
It won’t come off
“Wake up,” someone says, and I open my eyes.
I’m sitting in front of a TV, the color test pattern blindingly bright. I’m in a living room that I’ve never seen before, everything dark outside the television’s glare.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
It’s Stevie’s dad, the nice English teacher, and he’s in plaid boxer shorts and a fuzzy blue robe. He kneels down and puts a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s a school night, and Stevie didn’t have permission to have anyone over. Do you know what you’re doing here? And why you have … those?”
I look down at my lap. There’s a meat hammer and a cigarette lighter there, but I don’t know why. I wrap my fingers around the handle of the hammer. It feels good in my grip, and I give it a little squeeze. “I have to spread the word,” I tell him.
